With the advent of the computer age, computer software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help them write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. For example, modem electronic mail programs allow users to send and receive electronic mail to and from other users. Modem electronic mail programs also allow users to store sent or received mail in a variety of user-established storage folders.
Prior electronic mail systems typically provide a user interface through which a user may see and select received mail, sent mail, or stored mail. Such user interfaces may be used to display a listing of all electronic mail received, sent or stored in one or more user-established mail storage folders. A user may sort listed mail items using a number of sorting properties. For example, mail may be sorted by date received or date sent. Mail may be sorted by the name of the party from which mail is received or by the name of the party to which mail is sent. Mail may be sorted according to other sorting properties such as size of individual mail items or subject matter of mail items.
Electronic mail users often have large numbers of mail items in their received mail, sent mail and/or various mail folders. In order to find a particular mail item in any of the these mail categories, the user may scroll up or down through all mail items in a given category (e.g., received, sent, selected folder), or the user may first sort the mail, as described above, and then scroll up or down as desired. For example, if a user is looking for a particular mail item from her colleague, Bob, she may first sort her received mail based on a “received from” sorting property, followed by scrolling through all mail received from Bob to find the particular mail item. Unfortunately, if she has received numerous mail items from Bob, her task of locating the desired mail item may be time consuming, inefficient and cumbersome.
There is a need for an improved electronic mail user interface and mail viewing model that allows electronic mail to be automatically sorted and grouped into mail categories or arrangements that allow a user to more easily and efficiently locate desired mail items. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.